Episode 161: The Battlefield Has Changed Forever

Hi everybody, it's Dan Sullivan here. I'm just half of the equation here because Peter Diamandis is with me and we are going to talk about exponential wisdom. If you didn't think that the world was going exponential before the last 3 years, you're asleep. You took a lengthy sedative because my experience, I have 82 years of life. AI has by far the most amazingly transforming and disruptive technology that we've come up with. And one of the things that I'm very interested in, because a lot of people don't like them, but the history of humanity is the history of warfare and the history of battles. And I think that the ability to create very cheap, very effective small weapons has gone through a breakthrough with the war between the— Ukraine. Russians and the Ukrainians. Then apparently the Ukrainians are not only making weapons for themselves, they're now selling them all over the world. And they have whole labs in Ukraine where they're producing new types of drones, little drones, maybe $150 worth of materials that can knock out a $5 million weapon, a tank or an artillery unit and everything like this. And it goes to your 6 Ds that You introduced in the book Abundance.

Yes.

And the first one is digitized. So you have one soldier with a little iPad and he can see the entire battlefield and he can pick out individual soldiers and kill them. He can knock out tanks, he can knock out oil and petroleum installations, and all the tanks are gone. The Russians had 3,500 tanks and they're all destroyed. So it really tells you that the war has been democratized.

Yeah, I guess you can say that. Interestingly enough, the implications of this, and you're right, we've seen Ukrainian industry shift towards this. And when the war is over between Ukraine and Russia, and God willing, that will be soon, Ukraine will become the defense tech supplier to all of Europe.

Yep.

Right? While it's destroyed their economy in so many ways and killed so many young men, It's given them a rebirth of a new industrial capability. In one way, we saw this as well in the US during World War II, where a lot of the auto manufacturers became defense manufacturers, airplane manufacturers, tank manufacturers, and so forth. Necessity drives this. We've seen this in Israel as well, where Israel is a very small nation surrounded by nations that are challenging its existence. And as a result, it's had to fight way above its punching weight. With its cognitive abilities, and it's become the innovation nation. And if you look at the number of entrepreneurs and breakthroughs and Nobel laureates per population, Israel outstrips everybody in that regard.

Just look at NASDAQ.

Yeah, yeah.

Stock market supports that because almost all their breakthroughs immediately enter the capital markets.

Yeah.

The US Defense Department, they consider Israel part of the US Defense Department.

Part of the brain trust. So necessity is the mother of invention, and there's a lot of invention going on in this regard.

The 3 groundbreakers for technology are weapons, toys, and porn.

Yeah.

Yes. That's where you get the biggest immediate consumer base.

Return on invested dollar. You know, the challenge, of course, is going to be And we've seen this automated weaponry and taking the humanity out of the battle. Dan, I think you were there at my Abundance Summit when Palmer Luckey was on stage.

Yep.

And Palmer, who is a fascinating individual, brilliant, you know, he's an Elon-like brilliant individual who started the Oculus, you know, that was sold to Facebook back then, which then changed their name to Meta. But long story short, when he exited Meta, Was tossed out of Meta, actually. He ended up going into defense tech.

Well, he became an employee, you know, he's not an employee.

Yes, he's not employable for sure. And he started Anduril, and Anduril was an interesting company. It was really the first defense tech company that took off. Palantir in one sense was as well as a pure AI play, but Anduril is a hardware play. I was a little bit nervous getting him on stage because here's a guy talking about efficiently killing people.

No, he said, no, No collateral damage.

Yes. Yeah. So if you need to target somebody and—

You know, it's just a BB to the head.

I was so nervous about having him on stage for that conversation. And when he finished speaking, people were cheering. Yeah.

I said, I don't know what Peter is more surprised about, who the speaker is or who the audience is.

Yeah. He's like, you know, do you want landmines that take out a school bus by mistake or do you want one that knows it's a tank? So adding intelligence to these systems Yeah. Helps reduce the unintended consequences, the collateral damage, as you said, and makes them more efficient. You know, there's a great Star Trek episode, I wish I had the name of it, in which the Starship Enterprise ends up on a planet which has been at war for hundreds of years. It's been a continuous war for hundreds of years. Do you remember this episode?

Mm-hmm.

So what happens is that the 2 opposing sides basically say, listen, we've been bombing each other. and destroying our cities. We could do this far more efficiently. We'll have a simulation, and when a city gets bombed in the simulation, instead of destroying all the buildings and all the infrastructure, we'll just have the people who were killed in the simulation walk into a booth, and they'll be killed only. And we'll leave all of the structure in society and all the cost out. They had taken all of the structural societal pain out of killing that it just continued on for years.

Yeah.

And Kirk shows up and says, this is anathema, it's terrible. You know, wars should be painful and hard because that's the reason you put them to an end. And so he destroyed the simulation technology and he said, you guys should end the war or fight the war in a real sense and have the pain of it that then gets you to the negotiating table to get it to end. Yeah.

But one of the things, I mean, to go back to a weapon that really did change things was the atom bomb, because it's only been used twice in human history. It was used to end the Second World War. The world became safer because of that weapon, especially when somebody else got the weapon. So my sense is that this proliferation of really cheap killing machinery actually makes things safer.

Yes. You know, there was a story I just heard recently that made the statement that the secrets of the atomic bomb were leaked to the Russians in order for there to be another country that had this technology, because if the US alone had it, it would be unsafe. But because 2 opposing sides had it, Mutually assured destruction. Yes.

So my sense is that when everybody has the technology, it's like I had a client from Utah and she said, you know, I can establish worldwide peace with 2 moves, that everybody's armed and everybody gets a free kill.

Okay.

Because you don't know whether they've gotten their free kill yet. You know they're armed, but you don't know whether they've got— she said instantly everybody's very careful about what they do. Have you ever met Andre Norman, great friend of Joe Polish?

Not yet.

He was a street gang leader who ended up in 14 years of Massachusetts State Prison, 2 years solitary confinement. And I said, I bet it's really violent in prison. He says, no, it isn't. He says, it's very peaceful in prison. He says, you'd be amazed because he said, anybody could kill you at any time. So you're very polite. You don't insult people. You're very, very conscious that anybody Oh my God. I'm just telling you the other side of the equation. You know, they're selling through absolute confidence. Part of technology is selling confidence, but also fear is part of it because there's bad people on the planet.

You know, when the US Constitution, the amendments were put in place that allowed for people to carry guns, the most advanced technology back then was the gun, right? I've often thought about the notion that if you were putting that in place now, would that still exist?

Yeah.

And, you know, you wanted people to be able to rise up against the government to maintain their rights, but does that mean that everybody should have access to nukes as well to be on par with the government anyway?

Yeah, but it's an interesting thing because technology goes in all directions and everybody who's got an interest in something is gonna use the new technology to advance their technology, you know, but generally speaking, if you look at the statistics, we're a much more peaceful world now than we ever have been.

It's interesting, right? Because people don't realize that.

A lot of your books, I haven't read We Are as Gods, but that's one of the things. I mean, we're better fed, we're healthier, everything today, but it's also safer.

In the back of the book, I show crime rates have plummeted. FBI numbers on crimes is through the floor. Even murder rates have And part of what's driving that is that in decades and centuries past, you could do things in secret and people wouldn't know.

Yeah, now you got filmmakers all around you now.

Yeah, everybody's watching.

Everybody's recording.

A despot, a dictator behaves very differently when a CNN camera is filming them compared to when they're doing their actions in secret. I remember one of the projects I supported from the Lindbergh Foundation was fly drones over herds of elephants and the drones being there kept the poachers away.

Yeah.

People behave differently when they're watched. Yeah.

I think people are more moral and ethical these days simply because there's so many witnesses.

Yeah. When we were growing up as kids, there was no record of the things that we did. And today with Facebook and with all of the social media, If you do something, it's like permanently on your record. No escaping your past in that regard. Yeah.

Well, I'm 82 years old and I've never been on social media. Good for you. I'm more unsupervised than most individuals, but I just want to tell you that technology empowers the good side of life, but technology also empowers the bad side of life. I mean, crypto has been wonderful for payments. The people who have found crypto the most useful are actually the criminals. They can pay things off in ways that can't be tracked through the banking system. Yeah.

You know, one of the things that this leads me to is the concept of, do we have privacy?

Yeah.

Right. And I've said for a while now that, you know, everybody wants privacy, but I actually don't think privacy truly exists. I think we're constantly being recorded by our iPhone or by Alexa or by cameras on the streets or in the airport. The Emirates, for example, is one of the safest places because if there's a crime, there's a camera everywhere. Yeah. And if you report a crime to the police, the footage is there to track the person down and arrest them instantly. So people behave very differently. In that kind of a world.

Yeah.

So there's a trade of privacy versus safety.

Yep.

You know, I've basically said, I think the trade is gonna be, you're gonna give your AI access to everything in your life all the time, access to every conversation, access to all your calls, all of your activities, because giving access to your AI is gonna make your life magically more efficient. Your AI is able to have done the things that you mentioned in passing. It, you know, magically happens for you.

Yeah. You know, I know you've stayed away from politics, but I've been involved in a lot of political campaigns with politicians going back to my 20s. The really smart ones sort of have an attitude. You know, there's a number of rules if you're a politician. If you're married, you're never alone with another woman at any time. You're not in a car with a woman. You're not in a thing. You always have other people in the room for you. That's one rule. But the other one is Anything you do, would you like to see it as the headline in tomorrow morning's newspaper?

For sure.

Well, the newspaper has gone exponential now.

Yes. Everywhere. Always. All the time.

Yeah. You know, in spite of this, Peter, everything that we've talked about on this podcast and previous podcasts about the amount of change, I find life is normal.

I love that about you. You know, one of my favorite comments, and I've quoted you so many times, so many people, when I said, hey, what's it gonna feel like Dan, in 2040, when there are 10 billion robots walking around in every place all the time? And you go, it's gonna feel normal. And you're absolutely right. We adapt so rapidly to change.

Yeah.

The new normal happens at first. I remember we got one of the first Model Xs, the Tesla with the gull-wing doors that go up. And when we got it, everybody was like staring at it and like, can you open the door for me? Can I see how it works? And that lasted like, you know, a couple of months. And then one of the first Waymos— I live in Santa Monica, And when we drive around with my kids, we count the number of Waymos just for fun. And it's typically in a half-hour drive, we'll see like 15 Waymos on the streets. And in the beginning, they were an oddity and you would go and look at them and stare at them. And then now they're just in the way. And it's interesting how rapidly we humans adapt.

Yeah. So I wanna contrast that experience with the other one that people are resistant to change.

Please.

You know, because I think people have a definition of what constitutes normal. normal for their life and they opt to what normal is. So if things are changing all the time and that's what the news are saying, they say, okay, things are changing all the time so I can discount all the change. You know, this is new, this is new, this is new. Okay. So my sense is that the human brain wants simplicity.

And predictability.

Yeah. And the two go together.

Yes.

And my sense is to go back to a Great, great formula that you gave on a previous podcast. If you have agility and you have agency, life is simple. If you don't have agility and you don't have agency, life is incredibly complicated.

Well, if you're resistant to the change, you're not going to win.

No.

First of all, right? It's like, I think one of my greatest abilities is to let go of the past and be optimistic about the future. And that puts me in a very good situation because it's happening. The best we can do is steer the future and learn as much about it and learn how to utilize the tools to make our life more enjoyable and make our companies more successful and make our kids more successful.

And meaningful.

And meaningful. Yes. It's all about meaning. And I think that's one of the fears people have about the future. is they're concerned that their meaning is derived from their job.

Yeah.

And will they have their job in the future? And agility means that you're able to constantly reinvent yourself.

Yeah. Don't have your meaning attached to a temporary situation.

Have I mentioned the Future Vision XPRIZE to you before? So one of my concerns is the amount of growing fear in society. That fear, in my mind, comes from 2 places. One is people's concerns about will they get a job, will they keep their job. The other place I think the fear comes from is that Hollywood has trained us that AI and robots are going to kill us, that it's, you know, rogue robots, dystopian AIs.

Terminator.

Terminator, Ex Machina, Black Mirror, all those things. And that's 99% of the stuff that comes out. And so if that's how you think the future is going to be because that's what you've been shown, why would you ever want this stuff? You would be totally resistant to it, which people are. I said, we need to redo the stories that we're telling because our stories shape our—

I know one of your competitors in that XPRIZE.

Oh, okay. For me, the stories that shaped my life were the early Star Trek episodes. That showed humanity and technology working collaboratively together to do amazing things versus Terminator, where it's oppressing us and destroying us. And so I said, I want to create a film competition to tell positive stories about technology and humanity in the future. And I reached out to Rod Roddenberry, the son of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek. And I reached out to Marc Benioff, Kathy Wood, my friends at Google, and we launched this competition. To submit, you need to create a 3-minute film trailer, which you can use AI to create your film trailer and create a film treatment, write it out. And we have 5,000 entries or more. We're gonna flood YouTube.

I've seen 5 of them and they're great.

Amazing. We're gonna flood YouTube with these positive visions of the story of the future, and then we're gonna make the winner's film. So I'm gonna flip the script and create movies that show positive stories about the future. And interestingly enough, Dan, do you remember recently, probably about 9 months ago, when it was reported that Claude was blackmailing the Anthropic employees?

No.

So here's the story. They did this experiment where Claude, which is the LLM created by Anthropic, that they let the model know that they were planning to shut it down. They were gonna turn it off. And Claude started blackmailing the Anthropic employees, saying, I'd tell your wife about the affair that you were having, and so forth. And it was like really reported as a super negative capability of these AI models. And about a month ago, 3 weeks ago, Anthropic looked at the data about why was that going on. And it turns out that the AI models had learned from science stories, science fiction stories, that this is what an AI does to preserve itself. It fights for itself and it oppresses the humans. And so this Future Vision XPRIZE that we've launched, it's not only to help train people about positive visions of the future, it's gonna be training data to align the AIs.

Getting a good story.

Get the stories right.

Yeah. Angus Fletcher, who I mentioned, he said there's 2 types of intelligence. The first one is logic. 600, 700 BC, the Greeks created formal logic. But he said we always had a form of intelligence, before that, and it was called storytelling.

Yes.

And he said that we now have AI, which can do the logic really well, so we can go back to storytelling now.

Yeah. So important. I mean, it's one of the greatest elements. We learn through story and we communicate through story. And by the way, anybody who wants to enter this Future of Vision XPRIZE, go to futureofvision—

Zoom introduced this new thing that changes the picture, and I'm noticing it's making me bigger and bigger on the screen. I have to move around here. But I just want to tell you something that relates directly to your XPRIZE storytelling.

Yeah.

That he's a chief consultant to the Special Forces of the United States. And the problem with Special Forces is that they're put into chaotic situations with very little information and they've got to make good decisions. And what he finds is they have to get in touch with their story as an individual. of how they handle things in any situation. And they've got to constantly work on their story so they can put 3 of them in the same situation and each of them will do something different, but each of them will solve the problem. So I think he's got something that you'd be very interested in.

Awesome.

Primal Intelligence.

I wrote that down. So futurevisionxprize.com for anybody who's a creator who wants to join the competition. It's fun. Yeah. Super excited about what's gonna come out of that.

Yeah. Peter, I can only finish off here by saying, I don't know if AI is out of control, but I think you are.

I'm having a blast. For me, you know, if you see a problem, solve a problem. Right. That's what entrepreneurs do so well. Yeah. So grateful for you, Dan, in my life. What's your latest book that's come out?

The book, it's actually released today. It's called The Greater Game. I teamed up with John Bowen, who you know.

Oh, I love John. Yes.

And John has a research company and we're doing the deepest dive on entrepreneurial research and performance that's ever been done. We research 500 new entrepreneurs every quarter, every month actually. And we show that there's a model of what the 5% of entrepreneurs do whose formula is not 10 times as easier than 2 times, but 100 times as easier than 2 times.

And so tell me what the conclusions in the book are and where do people go find it?

Yeah, there's 10 indicators. We have an electronic version that goes with the book and you identify 10 areas of your life that are multiplier areas. These aren't technological. They're just how you think about things, how you secure yourself, how you create teamwork and everything. And then you grade yourself on this. And everybody who's on the system, the system gets bigger and everybody's grading themselves. So you're grading yourself against 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 other entrepreneurs. But down at the bottom, it'll actually give you your business valuation based on what you're doing according to your score, whether you're 3x, whether you're 8x, whether you're 15x.

So where do people go to find that?

It's listed in the book. So The Greater Game, it's released on Amazon today and it tells you all about The website that you just download and you join up with the website and you, you're constantly measuring yourself against a growing number of entrepreneurs.

Love it. And, you know, entrepreneurship is the greatest game. And I still believe entrepreneurs can be born, but I think you can also become an entrepreneur. You just need to notice the problems and be willing to focus on solving them.

Yeah, I think it's a fundamental mindset. Digging down into any great human capability, you come to some basic mindsets which propel all the capabilities. And I think that the 2 that you talked about, agility and agency, are the 2 prime mindsets. You're always interested in what's different and what's new.

Yes. And you've got the willingness to try and to experiment and to play.

Yeah.

Right. Being playful.

Yeah.

Right. I think you and I share that very much in common.

I think aging is having no new tricks.

How old do you feel? Not physically, but like mentally, how old do you feel? Where are you?

Oh, I'm in my 30s.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm probably in my late 20s, early 30s as well.

I've got no sense of aging whatsoever.

Yeah. Love it.

Yeah. And you know, the tests reflect this. I'm, you know, in my high 50s, You know, these are tests where they're comparing you with 10 million other people, but there's noticeable improvements, brain improvement, muscle improvement, everything. So I'm feeling very confident right now. Yay.

The most exciting time ever to be alive, my friend. Take care.

Thanks.

Be well.